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May we please have a station stop in the slavering over the Chinese high-speed rail program?

China itself is not so enamored, based on the crackdown on officials involved. Here's the latest from the South China Morning Post on the dismissal of the nation's Railways Minister and the engineer in charge of the system's R&D. Seems there were "severe violations of discipline," which is usually code for corruption. The larger issue with the vast (16,000 kilometers planned by 2020) endeavor is that it isn't, in fact, so appropriate to China's needs. Rather, it may be another symptom of a bubble economy in which vast sums are misspent on underutilized assets. (Hmmm...like in the financial whirl of America's "cowboy capitalism"!)

"The costs are raising worries over financing," the SCMP reports. "Major state-owned railway and rail car building companies with shares listed in Hong Kong and Shanghai [see China Railway Construction Corp., China Railway Engineering Corp. and subsidiaries ] are relying on bonds and bank loans to finance projects, with onerous repayment obligations that may be difficult to meet given the revenue projections for many projects." It all stems from the state and the railways ministry has amassed $300 billion in debt.

Turns out that even with ticket prices kept at levels that may please the adoring transit enthusiasts from abroad, the fares are too expensive to satisfy enough Chinese patrons. Also, a rail line might stop well short of a central business district. (Hmmm...perhaps to seed someone's land development nearby?)

The breakneck pace of the construction, which also has wowed Westerners, leads to concern about safety and durability of the lines and equipment. Considering allegations that much Chinese rail technology has been lifted from the likes of Mitsubishi Kawasaki Heavy and Siemens, which have sought their own deals there, this may reflect shortcuts in use of materials and labor more than in design. Perhaps such will come out in the probes that Beijing is undertaking.

The point of all this muck is not that trains are inherently a deficient way to move people between (or in) metropolitan areas. They can be very effective at that, at speeds that are appropriate to cost, and especially when tracks can be laid with minimal political holdup. But sometimes politics, and even more so the financial restaints of marketplace, can curb the massive misallocation of resources that is a hallmark of top-down systems such as in Communist China. To the degree that high-speed rail or other huge public works are undertaken in the U.S. without adequate scrutiny and in response to boosterism from self-interested parties, they are susceptible to the same flaws.